improvement not from windows 8

The improvement the engineers are seeing is from having new hardware to run on, although they seem to have downgraded on quality. The old CF-29 was a beast capable of surviving drops from huge height and had no need for a case. The new equivalent would be the CD-31.

It sounds like they're trying to write some windows 8 style apps though so maybe that will make it worthwhile. Somehow I doubt it, I find that as long as you have a keyboard it gets used over an onscreen replica

Average

I take it this is a mean average.

I think for this kind of study you'd be better off rounding all the speeds of to the nearest 512 or 256 kbps and then using a modal average. That way it doesn't matter if there are 10 people in your sample that all have 300Mbps connections on test from virgin. It would be far more informative to say most peoples connections were 1-2Mbps at peak and 10-15 off peak.

It also presents a better metric for uswitch to get people to switch. I'd imagine that on the whole most providers are very similar when you take a mean average of speeds.

screen choice

Recently a friend broke the gloss screen on his laptop, he bought it to me and asked me to replace it. I asked if he wanted a matte screen, he practically bit my hand off.

Now a matte screen replacement for his laptop was readily available for the same price as the glossy version. If that is the case why don't we see this as a choice?

Once you get passed the matte vs. glossy there are more problems. Resolution is one, laptops don't have enough resolution. At the same time screens made for desktop business use are being produced with daft resolutions my users don't want 1080p 21.5" screens. They liked the 1680x1050 22" screens. I'm not saying don't make glossy screens or 16:9 business screens just give the market a choice instead of deciding what they want for them. Personally I think 3:2 would be quite a nice ratio for a screen but nobody's going to start making one now.

Re: print to go?

I think it works as per your second theory, i.e. the blackberry appears as a printer to the computer. On the computer you go to print your boarding pass, train times etc. etc. you choose the blackberry as the printer. On your blackberry you can view the "printed" document.

dedupe

How can Microsoft get this stuff so wrong

It's not hard.

1. This device needs 8GB of RAM, 4GB is fine most of the time but sometimes it isn't, RAM is cheap but you can't put any more in this device so the manufacturer should include it.

2. The keyboard should be bundled, it's a major selling point of the device without it it's just a very expensive tablet with a limited supply of apps. If you're not bundling it then it should be $50 tops.

3. The SSD should be 128GB or 256GB, 64GB is going to disappear very quickly when you've got a full install of Windows. My laptop has a clean windows install and it's using 20GB, the surface pro will have a recovery partition using a similar amount. By the time you've installed Office and you're only starting at the formatted capacity of the SSD you're going to have about 10GB left for files.

My laptop is old and clunky and I'd definitely replace it with a surface if this stuff was solved, but the main problem with my current laptop is that it is maxed out at 2GB of RAM so I'm not going for anything that can't be upgrade to or comes with 8GB to start.

Re: I would upgrade but...

I think the upgrade assistant is confused.

Your USB3 will work but not with whatever drivers/tools you have installed now, Windows 8 has native USB3 so will provide its own drivers.

If you have a bluetooth stack I'm guessing your laptop is Toshiba if that's the case you'll find the Windows 7 one works fine but you'll probably need to uninstall it and then reinstall after the upgrade. Your MS tools will also be fine. I haven't found anything that runs under 7 that won't run under 8. Also there is compatibility mode for really troublesome apps.

Of course the best thing to do is not to actually upgrade but run a clean install.

"The directory layout is crap - "program files(86)" - Users/My Documents" etc. No! I want to work from a subdirectory that hangs directly off "C:\""

how is the directory layout of Windows different to unix. On unix home folders are /home/username, on windows they're C:\users\username. On unix programs are installed in /usr or /usr/local or /opt depending on how they got there. In windows, programs installed properly are in c:\program files. On unix settings are stored in /etc on windows they're in the Registry. Data used by programs is in /var on unix and in c:\programdata on windows. Apart from the registry it's total stupidity to think that these system differ in much more than the names.

"The Windows 7 file system is poor. It takes a long time to copy /manipulate files, relative to Linux / Mac etc. "

NTFS is a very good filesystem, compared to ext4 it's amazing. I performed a live expansion of an ext4 filesystem the other day I need to grow a 6TB array by 1TB, it took 4 days. The same job on NTFS takes a few seconds. Also deleting files on ext4 is very slow compared to NTFS. Unlike you I'm not going to comment on the mac filesystem because I know nothing about it, it could be the greatest filesystem going but I don't know, because like you and Windows I don't use it.

fibre not the problem

I don't think fibre to the home is the problem here. I have a FTTC based VDSL product and it's connected at around 80Mbps, however if I'm downloading a file the download speed will only rarely hit 7MB/s usually I see 4-5.

BT have a FTTH product but it connects onto the same backbone as the VDSL so I'd wager a lot of the time the improvement is minimal.

At the same time the amount of data people need to download will plateau the big consumer of bandwidth at the moment is video streaming, but compression techniques are improving all the time. 80Mbps is already enough to stream native bluray content video can be compressed far better than it is on a bluray. Problem is that there are very few services that could cope with a lot of people all wanting to stream video at those kinds of rates.

Re: @Artic Fox: You are surely not suggesting that there are companies out there........

Re: Its never the parents fault eh?

not usually, I drank pretty much every week from when I was 15 until I was legally allowed to buy alcohol at 18, (I didn't stop then but that's beyond the scope of this comment). My parents would have been outraged if they had known but I would go out and stay with friends or come back late after they were in bed.

If you have a law that says it's illegal to sell alcohol to minors then it makes perfect sense to test and prosecute shops that don't comply with that law.

first thing on the list to do

If facebook want people to use their search then probably the first thing on the list is to make the search box on the site look more like a search box. At the moment the box is slightly reminiscent of the interior of a Hotblack Desiato stunt ship.

Re: Search for which movies or music your friends liked!

Forming your own opinions is not the issue. The problem is some of my friends have terrible taste in films and music, they aren't my friends for their film or music tastes. Therefore if I'm wondering what films or music my friends like I'll generally ask them when I speak to them, which I do because they're my friends, rather than waiting for them to volunteer this information to a social media site and then leeching the information from there.

Similarly if I need a plumber I'll know if any of my friends have used one recently and ask them about that.

buy buy sell sell

Nobody wants a facebook phone, if you want facebook on your phone there are loads of phones that do that already either with apps like iOS or integrated into the OS like Windows phone.

To make a search engine that people stop using Google for you will have to make something amazing, since facebook isn't amazing why would anyone think that a search engine produced by facebook would be amazing.

Problem is people don't like not having access to files

I have friends who are pretty IT literate and they refuse to accept that it's not stupid when windows denies you write access to program files. They can't grasp that their should be no reason to write to program files as a normal user and if they have a program that requires that then the either the program needs rewriting or the program should set the correct permissions when it installs.

chargecard

I guess

I guess you could craft a drive by exploit that used a users PC to take control of the router and then you could install some sort of smtp gateway on the router and use that to send spam but it's a bit of a long shot. You'd need to find the combination of a computer vulnerable to your drive by that's also connected to a linksys router. Do people still use linksys routers? Aside from those that have them running tomato or dd-wrt etc.

In the UK most people have a router provided by their ISP and I don't remember seeing any linksys gear obtained this way.

Re: installation disc?

If the laptop runs Windows 7 you just need a windows disc and you can reinstall using the product key on the bottom of the computer. Microsoft removed the requirement to match up discs and product keys in Windows 7.

Re: Question:

Logitech make bluetooth mice and keyboards but their proprietary stuff is better.

The devices are paired with the dongle, several devices can be paired with one dongle and vice versa. Once you've paired the devices (and if you buy a kit it's done for you) they behave like a wired keyboard and mouse.

Want to move from one computer to another, just unplug the dongle and stick it in the other computer. Doesn't matter what that device is as long as it has support for USB mouse/keyboard it will just work.

Bluetooth pairing depends on the quality of the bluetooth software on the computer. You have to place the device in a discoverable mode then get the computer to search then supply a pin and if you're lucky then it works but the next day it might be working or you might be back to square one.

Also my logitech mouse lasts 18 months on a single AA battery, they keyboard can go for 3 years. Bluetooth devices need charging once a week or new batteries once a month.

The concept of bluetooth is great but I've always found it to be a major let down where HID is concerned.

Re: I do not want to sound like

Re: Deep Packet Inspection of SSL-Encrypted Traffic

This is installed in a business situation where you can create your own trusted root and deploy it to all the computers in the business. The trusted root is used to sign a wildcard certificate that the sonicwall box uses to do the encryption.

I would guess that if you have that rapport software installed that banks like people to download it would flag this as dodgy since the certs wouldn't match.

Re: Does it work on Linux?

the security hole will be there in the Linux version but to do any damage you would most likely have to write a specific version of the exploit. The example there shows the windows calculator being started but you could just as easily write it to execute something in perl or bash.

Only one real point

Only real point in this that I can see is that you can listen to the tracks as soon as you purchase the CD. Ripping a CD takes less than 10 minutes even if you're being really careful with your tagging and ripping and most people want to be able to put the tracks on their phone or mp3 player which this isn't going to allow unless your phone supports Amazon's chosen DRM.

and...

Amazon offer this too and like with Apple you have to pay for it.

Google offer it free for 20000 tracks and Microsoft do something similar which they don't seem to tell people about so I have very few details. I can access a large portion of my personal music collection stored on my Windows 8 PC on my Windows 8 laptop and on my Windows 8 phone but at no point did I set anything up I'm just using the same MS account on all three devices.

I guess it depends what devices you have, if you're on an iDevice then iTunes is probably best, for a Kindle use Amazon, for Android you can use Google and if you're all Windows you can use Microsoft.

navigation

Something that HTC kept very quiet about on my mozart is that the locations app was upgraded from something used to "check in" at locations to a satnav app with turn-by-turn. Only found this out after I bought my Ativ S.

I would have bought an 8X but got the ativ S instead purely for the SD card slot. I didn't want the 8S or the 820 because of 800x480 screens.

rice cooker

a traditional rice cooker, without any fancy features, is one of the most simple devices you'll find in a kitchen. It's basically just a kettle with the thermostat set just above 100°C. Whilst the water is boiling the temperature won't go over 100, as soon as the water is gone the temperature rises and the cooker turns off.

Until the rice cooker can load it's own rice and water I see no need for it to be controlled by anything other than plugging it into the wall.

Standard pricing

Surely the pricing should be negotiated when the patent is standardised. At that point it should be decided the owner of the patent gets x pence for each device implementing the standard for the next y years falling to z pence per device after that.

The price is set, there's no negotiation after that point and anyone is free to use it at the prescribed cost. If they don't want to pay the price, they don't use the standard.

and Microsoft aren't improving the situation, they should include updated versions of IE with service packs. At the moment IE6 will be supported up until 2015 when server 2003 is retired, IE7 and IE8 till 2020 when 2008 support ends. So that's still another 7 years of this kind of story.

obsolete versions of IE

"obsolete but still widely used versions of Microsoft's web browser software browsers"

"ob·so·lete

/ˌäbsəˈlēt/

Adjective

No longer produced or used; out of date."

unfortunately all these versions of IE are still current and supported by Microsoft. IE8 certainly can't be called obsolete because it's the highest version available for XP and server 2003 both of which are widely used.

tiles

So on the windows 8 TIFKAM start screen vetically do you get...

3 tiles like you can see on the Dell video

4 tiles as shown on your photos

or 5 tiles as you would expect on a 1080p screen

I'm tempted by this device but I don't really want or need the tablet part. If Dell made this device for a bit less money just as a laptop and with a matte screen I'd take it, but paying for the "flipping screen" (this is what you'll call it in 2 years time when the connection wears out) which I can only see myself using for the first week seems stupid.

XBMC

I went to check out the XBMC PVR stuff in the new beta. I was always a big fan of XBMC right from the start out of XBMP so I'd love to use this. In short it looks like a nightmare. You have to install a backend and a frontend then manually load plugins and get the whole thing to talk to each other.

Contrast this with WMC where you simply click setup live TV then agree to a few terms and 10 minutes later everything is done for you.

It's a shame XBMC is so complicated I'd like to switch to a PVR that can record multiple shows from a single multiplex/transponder. It means that for freeview HD you only need 1 HD tuner and the rest can be cheap £5 jobs from ebay. With 6 tuners you'd be able to record everything that was on. I just don't want watching TV to be too much like real work.

Re: So glad I'd already given up on MS and Media Centre

"Stu. you must be running it on a high powered box the codecs you can use in WMC don't support offloading to the GPU so if you're trying to play HD on a nice quite little small form factor PC such as the Acer REVO you'll only get unacceptable jerky performance."

This just isn't true. The onboard h.264 codec uses DXVA to offload to the GPU. I had HD tv on an Atom Ion Revo. That played video fine but struggled a bit recording two streams whilst playing back a 3rd so I upgraded to an AMD APU based machine.

If your computer wasn't offloading to GPU then most likely you had installed some awful codec pack that was using ffdshow for everything or you just needed to update your graphics drivers.

I use the media browser plugin for accessing my media files I find it looks and behaves much better than the built in browser.

Re: well thats a surprise

WMC is a very good PVR, it's a shame Microsoft seem to be shunning it. I have mine set up with dual freeview HD and DVB-S2 for foreign football. Also works great with all the online catchup services.

As for the EPG I only noticed on BBC HD as all the other channels could still happily pull the TV guide from the freeview/satellite signal. Freeview HD has an encrypted EPG so media centre isn't able to access it.

The problem with media centre is that Microsoft never pitched it well. They gave it a go when Windows 7 came out, there was an advert where a women was really pleased she could watch TV on a tiny laptop screen when her partner threw a rugby ball through the flatscreen TV. What they should have been showing was a computer attached to the giant flatscreen. Almost noone is going to watch TV on a laptop via a DVB tuner when it's easier to stream stuff over the net. Microsoft needed to partner with OEMs to offer boxes specifically aimed for STB use.

Re: ?

"In any case, it just goes to confirm one more time how many of the certificate authorities do not belong on the trusted list in the first place."

Totally agreed, there was a recent update to the certificate authorities on Windows that broke my 802.1x because the number of trusted certificates went over 200. Some of them are just ridiculous, I can't remember the last time a site I went to had a certificate not signed by one of the major authorities

hardware

I agree with the label of bonkers

I can maybe forgive the software side, iOS vs. Android is a tough one to call and some people are always going to come down on one side of the fence, but the idea that Apple make better phone hardware is laughable. The only iPhone that had a decent set of specs across the board was the 4S. Everything else has been significantly behind the curve of other smartphones. The iPhone is sold on the strength of iOS and the Apple brand not the specs of the phone.

However there is a general sentiment in this article that I do agree with. What I want from a smartphone is one that connects to all the available services and allows me to use them all with the same level of integration.

What I don't agree with in the article is that Matt seems to be suggesting that companies should never branch out. So Nokia shouldn't do mapping? Maybe Apple should never have made the ipod, or portable computers of any kind, they should have stuck at the Apple II and a laserwriter.

USB 2.0

Interesting how in the tests USB 2.0 is faster than firewire 400 and most of the time quicker than 800.

All in all this test just shows why thunderbolt will remain a niche product for the foreseeable future. USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2 so it's not a new thing to learn you can use your old drives in new systems and new drives in old systems and for most people it's as fast as the new thunderbolt.

Where thunderbolt shines is as in the Apple system where a single cable into your laptop from your monitor acts as a docking station. Even this is still a niche solution as most people are happy to hook up an HDMI or VGA cable and access any other peripherals wirelessly. Problem is Apple's monitors are stupidly expensive so we need to wait for other manufacturers to start producing similar products (assuming Apple don't have a patent on a peripheral dock built into a monitor). Also I don't remember seeing a laptop other than a mac that has a thunderbolt port.